Throwback: The Night Sky is Dead
A brief ramble about angels and aliens
We published this piece back in January of 2025, when we had a little over a hundred subscribers. We have another piece on the “angels are demons” idea coming soon, but if you’d like to get up to speed on our thinking about UFOs, this piece is a good starting point.
While at home this Christmastide, my brother and I got into a bit of an argument.
This might shock many of you, I know I put off the aura of a thoroughly agreeable fellow, but my brothers and I all enjoy arguing with each other when we’re home, often to the consternation of others around us. We’ll be having a grand old time fighting about something inconsequential while the rest of the family rolls their eyes at us. Perhaps this constitutes a lack of social awareness on our part, but we have a lot of fun doing it.
In any event, my oldest brother was telling us all about how he’s lately been interested in UFOs and, since that time, he’s seen some strange lights in the sky above his house. Playing the rationalist for once in my life, I told him they were probably just spotlights from some business in town landing on the nighttime clouds. He told me I didn’t know what I was talking about, and we went back and forth in this vein for quite some time.
It was at this point that I told him my own interpretation of the UFO phenomenon - I just think they’re demons. Or something spiritual, anyways. My brother didn’t like this and told me in no uncertain terms how stupid my suggestion was. I responded that it probably isn’t any more stupid than thinking spotlights are flying saucers and at this moment we were both silenced for the sake of domestic peace.
I’ve been thinking about that conversation since it happened last week. Specifically, I’ve been wondering what exactly it is that causes us to interpret strange lights or shapes in the sky as spaceships from another planet. Of course, more than nine times out of ten those strange lights are going to be some relatively mundane phenomena being misinterpreted. If we find something genuinely unexplainable, though, our instant reaction is to assume that it must be some sort of machine.
Why is this, though? For most of human history, unexplainable occurrences in the sky would have been interpreted as some sort of spiritual reality. Why do we immediately view it as a mechanical reality? This is true of most of us in the modern west, even if we believe in a more traditional view of the cosmos. Our worldview, or whatever you want to call it, is shaped in such a way that we almost seem forced to this conclusion.
Take the vision of Ezekiel as a test case of this. Ezekiel famously saw a vision of the glory of the Lord while in captivity in Babylon. Included in this vision were a set of four entities that were circles within circles, with their rims covered with eyes. These eye-covered wheels fly in tandem with the tetramorphs, the angels with four heads, around the throne of God.
How would those of us in 2024 react if we saw Ezekiel’s wheels? I would imagine most would identify them as spaceships, or as some sort of aircraft at the very least. In fact there have been books written to this effect, most notably by a NASA engineer who was certain that Ezekiel’s wheels are evidence for the presence of aliens on Earth in the ancient past. Yet, despite it seemingly like a more “rational” explanation, Ezekiel does not believe these things are machines. They are angels, attending to the presence of God.
The primary reason for this shift in interpretation, from the spiritual to the mechanical, is that our skies are dead. I mean this in a couple of ways. In the first place, most of us spend very little time looking at the night sky. This makes sense, as our night skies are often blacked out through light pollution, especially for those of us who live near large population centers. Anything seen moving in the night sky is likely to be artificial, either a plane, helicopter, or a satellite. Strange movement in the skies is naturally attributed to mechanical agents because of this.
In the pre-industrial world, as in some parts of the world today, the sky was alive with motion. The moon, stars, and planets were all clearly visible and clearly in motion. If you go out into the countryside, far away from the city lights, sometimes you can even catch a glimpse of the great celestial spheres in motion across the night sky. This movement was not understood to be the result of impersonal forces at work, either. I say that it was alive with motion because the movement of the spheres was understood to be guided by a higher intelligence. When ancient man gazed up at the heavens, he was watching the master craftsman of the universe still actively at work.
Just as it is natural for us to assume mechanical agency in our night sky, because that is the sort of movement we see most frequently, it was natural for premodern man to assume spiritual agency in their night skies. If God, through his angels, was behind the ordinary movement of the night sky, then it only made sense that strange movement came from the same source. Strange celestial phenomena was naturally interpreted as an event of “supernatural” or spiritual causation in this framework.
We can see a clear example of this, by the way, in Nuremburg in 1561. Hundreds of strange shapes came “out of the sun” and did battle with one another across the sky, in full view of the residents of Nuremburg. These shapes included a large triangle, hundreds of spheres, cylinders, and even crosses. As they fought, some of them would flame out and fall to the ground. All of this was reported by a broadsheet, a sort of proto-newspaper, in the month that it happened.
The denizens of Nuremburg didn’t know what to make of this, as you might guess, but it doesn’t appear to have crossed their mind that these were mechanical entities. They were seen as some sort of sign from God, meant to lead the people back to repentance. These signs were certainly strange, but ultimately they had the same cause as everything else they saw happening in the sky.
This ties into the second important point. We tend to draw a sharp contrast between the “natural” and the “supernatural.” The natural world, to us, is effectively a mechanical world. We might be naturalists and think that the world-machine, the machina mundi, is all there is or we might be “supernaturalists” and think that the world-machine has a creator. Perhaps the creator even intervenes in the operations of the machine, on the occasion.
On this view, any anomaly either has to be unreal or an act of violence against the natural order. This seems to be why the phenomena of UFOs in the sky are identified the way they are. No one claims to actually know what they are, they are unidentified flying objects! Often the maneuvers they are reported as doing defy our understanding of what is physically possible for a machine to do. Yet, we know that the only things in our experience that can do such violence against the natural order are machines and thus UFOs must be machines.
Our dead night skies are a result of this mechanical model of the world. It’s a very useful model for the scientific project. I don’t know that the scientific endeavor could have begun if this idea wasn’t present at some level. No model, however, can be completely accurate. I don’t believe God created a mechanical universe that he wound up and left to run on its own. I believe in secondary causation throughout the universe, sure, but all of it happens under the auspices of God’s providence.
Because of this, I don’t feel compelled to believe that the unexplained oddities of the night sky are due to flying saucers full of little green men. Perhaps they are part of the ordinary course of the world that we haven’t discovered yet or perhaps there is some deeper spiritual significance to them. I don’t claim to have the answer to that. What I do know is that I want our skies to be alive again.
If the aliens are a casualty to that belief, then so be it.